Live Through This (22 page)

I nodded. "It's hard for me too..." But I didn't finish because she was swatting that comment away along with her smoke, refusing to take it on, worried, I suppose—and she was right—that I wouldn't be able to keep from telling her how much she'd hurt me, how much I'd been wounded and saddened by her running away and the decisions she'd made while she was out there, whatever those were.

"But I'm glad to be home," she finished. She looked straight at me for the first time. "I want to be home."

Later I'd understand how difficult it was for her to say such words—how impossibly hard it had been to choose to return to our house, as coming back to me required that she drive a wedge between herself and Stephanie. But she wasn't ready to fill me in on that part yet. She was years from filling me in on that part.

On our hundred-mile drive to Eugene, Amanda rifled through the tape box in the car looking for music she could stand to listen to, and I finally said Stephanie's name. That's when I got Amanda to tell me—as much as she was willing to reveal, anyway, as much as I was willing to hear—about their last night together. The girls had appeared at their father's house, but when Ellen saw how dirty they were (and likely how stoned), she refused to let them in. Tom came out on the porch and handed Amanda a twenty and told them to get something to eat. They had to stay away awhile; maybe come back in a few days, he told them. "Dad," Amanda said, but he shook his head and put his hand on the doorknob. Ellen called his name. Their toddler began crying. Amanda and Stephanie walked
across the grass and down the street, where they caught a bus. A few hours later, they spent the money on a batch of heroin.

Tom had given them dollars to buy drugs—this part of the story both infuriated me and, in a typical reaction to his perceived wrongdoings, inflated me with self-righteousness. I gave Amanda a sidelong glance, firing the same old thoughts in her direction:
Why do you keep going back to him? Why can't you realize that he'll do you no good?
In that moment in the car, I let myself believe I would have done marvelously well if Amanda and Stephanie had landed on my doorstep, that I would have brought them into the house and worked out some kind of agreement, even a fury-filled tentative pact, which would at least have kept them safe. But that was a story to make me feel better, better about Amanda's heroin use and better about Stephanie's disappearance. I was every bit as wrung out by these kids as Tom was, and in truth I probably would have done the same—some equivalent of thrusting cash out and shooing these troublesome girls away.

Amanda's story of that night continued: After the shot of bad heroin, after the overdose, Stephanie went with her sister to the hospital by ambulance. Hours later, Amanda was conscious and cleared by the emergency room doctor. No insurance, no names or phone numbers for them to call on her behalf; once she was coherent, she had to get out. A cop took them to a state-run group home, which the girls promptly ran away from. They slept on the streets that night, and the next morning they were separated—Amanda hauled away by another police officer, and Stephanie gone. Gone where? Gone how?

"Where's my stuff?" Amanda asked me. She stood in the opening between the living room and the dining room with her arms crossed high on her chest, skinny elbows shot out like arrows. Behind her, the door to the room she shared with Stephanie was open, the overhead light switched off. The day before, I'd cleaned that room, mopping the oak floors, pounding dirt out of the rug, washing her sheets and blankets.

"What stuff?" I asked her, though of course I knew exactly what
she was talking about. Mary and Mollie stepped closer at the suggestion of argument in this tense exchange. They'd hovered near me ever since we got home, whispering as if a sick person or baby was in the next room, while I made tuna fish sandwiches and tomato soup for lunch. The three of us now stared at Amanda.

"What do you mean, what stuff? My records. My clothes. My posters," she said, fists clenched. "All my shit. What did you do with it?"

I opened my mouth, then shut it again. She whipped around and returned to her room, muttering under her breath and snapping the door closed.

It was true: the Sunday they'd left on this longest of runaway ventures, I'd barged into the girls' bedroom. I'd claimed everything I wanted to claim. If they were going to walk out on us again, I decided, I was going to take what I wanted. The filthy piles of shirts and pants and single Converse tennis shoes and Hamm's beer cans in the closet and endless oblongs of flattened red Pall Mall packages taped to the walls. Tattered Nirvana and Hole posters from when Amanda was in the seventh grade. Records by the Subhumans, Bikini Kill, the Dead Kennedys, Dystopia. I scrubbed the anarchist letters off the wall; I painted over the slogan I'd never understood, which Stephanie had scrawled huge above the closet:
Sell out, shell out.
With an extra-wide garage broom, I swept everything to the middle of the room and shoved it in plastic bags. My fury at these daughters poured from me and into the broom handle, into the bent straw bristles that swept hard across the floor, and into the scraped-up piles of crap. From one corner to the other, I made clean surfaces in a room that had, for too long, been the dark, dank secret edge of our house.

When Amanda and Stephanie were little girls, I'd get fed up with the clutter of their bedroom—an earlier bedroom in an old rambling house—and would give them one hour to clean it up. Whatever was left out after the hour went into a plastic bag, and the bag went into the basement for two weeks. I soon figured out they secretly loved the idea of the disappeared toys. Two weeks after the bag had been taken from them, they'd bump it up the stairs to their
room to rediscover its treasures, Stephanie reaching into its maw while Amanda waited, holding her breath, to see what nearly forgotten thing would come out first: a Barbie dress, a smelly marker, a Strawberry Shortcake doll. But there were no bags stored away now, waiting for their return. I had dragged the sack out to the curb and propped it next to the green trash bin. I paid the extra ten dollars for the garbage service to haul everything away, determined not to see every day or live in the same house with the symbols of what my daughters had become—what they believed in now.

On Christmas Eve 1996, eight days after Amanda's return from Tucson, I knocked on the door of that room, which she'd reclaimed and begun to re-clutter with her drawings of skinny, bald punk rockers and her wads of dirty clothes that I could smell from halfway down the hall, and I asked her to come out and join us. Mary and Mollie were reorganizing piles of presents for the tenth time that day and drinking mugs of eggnog topped with freshly grated nutmeg; Nat King Cole crooned from the stereo about baby Jesus. Barry would come first thing in the morning, for the present-opening and the homemade cinnamon rolls, but for now it was just us. Amanda had hardly left the room since she'd gotten back, and I didn't know if she would now. She listened to Tom Waits:
Frank's Wild Years
mostly. She read Adrienne Rich poetry and Denis Johnson stories. She wouldn't watch television or movies with us—she'd come to hate television, and refused even when Mary had invited her to "cogitate in front of the tube" when
cogitate
was on Mary's English class spelling list. Amanda emerged from the room to eat and then went back in. She slept. For over a week, she'd been sleeping day and night.

She did come out from the dim interior after my knock, the scent of sour milk trailing after, a red scarf tied around her head making the nubbin of hair there stand forest straight. Amanda had the mobile phone in her hand; she'd been clutching it since breakfast that morning, and I knew why. She was sure Stephanie wouldn't let Christmas pass without a phone call. The holiday had always been a big deal with the five of us, with Stephanie watching
the closest to make sure we performed each of our rituals the same way as the year before—hanging the fake-candy train ornament, digging out the stockings, setting out a hot toddy for Santa, making the old family cinnamon roll recipe for breakfast. If Stephanie was going to call, it would be on Christmas.

"Do you want to find the Santa candle?" I asked Amanda. She rubbed the crust from her eyes and shrugged. I'd purposely left the candle in the cardboard box after pulling out the ornaments and tinsel. It, too, was seventeen years old, bought at a garage sale a few months before she was born. As soon as she could hold a match, Amanda had the job of lighting it. Every Christmas Eve, this old Santa burned while I read
The Night before Christmas,
then she alone blew out the flame. The head was gone now, except for a few white curls at the chin. We had his red-clad body left to melt down, his belly and stubby legs and black-booted feet.

Amanda unwrapped the candle from tissue paper and set it on a pile of magazines, pulled her Bic from her pocket, flashing the flame, and leaned toward the stunted wick. Mary handed me the worn book that waited on our shelves, and, the little girls on either side of me, I began to read about the thrown-open shutters and the moon on the snow. Amanda didn't leave the room, but I could tell she wasn't listening. She lost herself in one of our tattered wing chairs, knees to her chin, and stared at the phone, willing it to ring. I raised my eyes between pages to look at her and noticed Mary and Mollie too were more intent on their sister than the story.

"Can we open a present now?" Mollie said, jumping to her feet.

"Sure," I told her, relieved to be setting in motion another Christmas Eve tradition, a single gift before bed. It was one of the last things we had to do to put this night behind us.

On her hands and knees, Mary dug under the tree and pulled a small box from Amanda's pile. "Here's one," she said, holding it out.

Amanda swung her feet over the arm of the chair, kicking toward Mary in a bored rather than angry way. "I don't want to," she said. "You guys go ahead."

Mary's face fell, defeated, and I felt the whole room teeter on the
verge of coming apart, each of us about to fly to another area of the house to avoid the others.

"Let's do presents later," I said, standing up, shaking myself out, scrambling for what to say next so that no one started crying, so that Amanda wouldn't retreat behind her closed door for more long days.

"Why don't we write Stephanie some letters?" I said. It came out in a spurt—a kind of on-the-spot suggestion that actually frightened me a little. Once we started writing, I realized in the stark moment after I spoke, I'd have even less control over what was said and what emotions might be in our house, my jangled emotions included.

Amanda didn't answer. She watched me piggyback Mollie into my small office, where I gathered typing paper and a handful of pens while my youngest daughter knifed her chin into my shoulder. Back in the living room, Mollie slid down my legs and took a seat at one end of the coffee table; Mary was at the other. I gave the little girls the letter-writing accouterments then held out the same toward Amanda. She rose from her chair, blue sweatpants sagging low on her narrow hips, her gray wool socks flopping a couple of inches beyond her toes. She took paper and pen and headed into the dining room.

I sat on the sofa, laid a book in my lap, and smoothed a clean piece of paper in front of me.
Stephanie,
I wrote at the top of the page. Nat King Cole finished "Silent Night," and the tape clicked off. The only sounds now were the hum of lights from the tree and rain falling on our roof.

Since the letter idea was mine, I had to write one to my daughter, who'd be fourteen for only another week. I began by picturing her—tall and thin and fine boned, brown eyed, with a long neck and a perfectly shaped nose. But what to say? I love you? I hate you—or at least, I hate what you're doing? I remember you? I don't remember you? I want you to come home? I didn't know what I wanted anymore—dealing with Amanda felt like as much as I could handle. I wondered if I could endure these two together if
Stephanie did show up on our porch. Yet how could I go on, even another day, not knowing where she was?

I re-smoothed the paper with Stephanie's name written across the top. I wrote it again,
Stephanie,
the second name beneath the first, remembering the day she was born—blasting into the world, screaming and red faced. I recalled again how adults had always loved her quirks, which I could guarantee went mostly untolerated in their own kids—the way she wore the same dress every single day of kindergarten along with a floppy straw hat and a pair of pink jelly shoes; the way she would drink milk only if it was food-color-dyed a deep-sea blue. And from the time she was a toddler, that part of her that wanted to hide, wanted to
run.

One night when Stephanie was not quite three, Amanda found me in the produce aisle of the grocery store. "I can't find Stephy," she said.

"Doesn't Daddy have her?" I looked toward the magazine rack. Tom was leaning against the end, engrossed in the latest issue of
Omni.

"She went somewhere," Amanda said.

I hurried toward my husband, my basketball belly bouncing against my thighs—Mary was a month away from being born. "Where's Stephanie?" I asked him.

He looked up from the magazine. "I don't know. Didn't she go with you?"

I walked the length of the store, calling Stephanie's name up and down each aisle, Amanda next to me and calling too. We met Tom in the middle and started over again. After the second search of the store, legs prickling and jaw clenched, I went to find the store manager and stood beside him as he made the announcement over the loudspeaker. Two-and-a-half-year-old girl. Blue pants, cats on her shirt, hot pink parka. Sneakers on her feet. "Her parents are pretty scared up here," he said. "Can everyone stop and have a look around?"

I walked to the front door of the grocery and watched the automatic doors slide open every time someone put weight on the
black rubber mat. If we didn't find Stephanie within a few minutes, we'd have to search outside, call the police, get crowds of people involved, and real confusion would start. The parking lot was huge, slick, and dark. If she had wandered out there, no one was going to see her past the narrow light cones of the high fluorescent lamps.